Living it large
A billionaire has bought all seven penthouse suites in a newbuild on London’s Oxford Street, says Gary Parkinson
Penthouse living has long been synonymous with style and success: having the wherewithal to live centrally, but high above the hoi polloi, with views over a city you could quite justifiably regard as yours alone.
But what if one penthouse isn’t enough? What if there are seven penthouses on the top floor, retailing for a combined £21.4m? Surely you can’t buy them all?
Turns out you can, and someone has – purchasing the entire top deck of the TCRW Soho residential scheme off-plan, to bag what can only be described as a mega-penthouse looming above London’s Oxford Street. It’s the famous shopping street’s most expensive home ever.
The buyer – described simply as an “Asian billionaire,” of which money-monitoring Forbes magazine estimates there are 1,149 – is said to be turning the whole floor into either one or two properties.
If it becomes one residence, what a pad it will be, with more than 7,200 sq ft of living space surrounded by more than 1,000 sq ft of wraparound private terraces, overlooking the beating heart of London’s West End: Oxford Street’s shopping by day, Soho’s nightlife after dark.
Depending on the precise reformulation of the original plans, it could also offer up to eight VIP bedroom suites, several large reception rooms, a home cinema, library and exercise studio. Or, perhaps, pretty much whatever the buyer requests: as a tournament-standard basketball court is 4,500 sq ft, there’s plenty of room for one of those, with space round the side.
The whole TCRW Soho scheme sits atop the new entrance to the Tottenham Court Road station (hence the first three initials) built to accommodate Crossrail, the huge new west-east line linking London mainline termini Paddington and Liverpool Street, not to mention destinations as distant and disparate as Heathrow, Reading and Shenfield via the new Elizabeth Line.
Designed by architectural practice Hawkins\Brown with specification and interior design by Argent Design, the scheme incorporates two separate apartment buildings. One five-storey block overlooking Dean Street – a classic Soho thoroughfare which has played host to Mozart, Marx, Admiral Nelson and Charles Dickens, among many others – is designed in a Georgian style inspired by Soho’s townhouses of that era, providing 23 apartments and 1,950 sq ft of retail.
The mega-penthouse will be in the other block, a six-storey Art Deco-inspired building facing onto Oxford Street, Britain’s most famous shopping thoroughfare. The building will add 7,989 sq ft of retail below 69 apartments – or perhaps now five or six fewer.
The developer’s website says the scheme was inspired by hotel living, although whether anyone pops by to place chocolates on your pillow is unclear. Either way, each block has its own entrance and reception, so you don’t have to mix with that lot round the corner.
Announced in 2019, the whole scheme was originally set for completion in summer 2022, but COVID-19 knocked that back as part of the huge uncertainty it brought to the property market. However, in March this year, developer Gaillard Homes secured £76m in financing from lenders Natwest and Leumi UK, the London-based subsidiary of the Israeli bank, to complete the project.
If that was a risk, it seems to have paid off. The en-bloc penthouse sale is a huge boon for the project, now scheduled for build completion in early 2023, and is being seen as typical of the confidence returning to the market. In early November, a forecast from Savills estate agency predicted prices in prime central London would rocket 23.9 percent by 2026, with values expected to rise 8 percent in 2022 alone.
That latter rise would hoik the value of the supermegapenthouse by another couple of million above the Asian billionaire buyer’s £21.4m outlay, before he or she even moves in. So don’t you go losing any sleep – whether you’re in the penthouse, on the pavement or anywhere in between.
• Penthouse at TCRW Soho, £21.4m, via galliardhomes.com
Originally published by Metro, 23 Nov 2021
